LC045: When to Build your Marketing Website

launchpeer - July 27, 2018 - 0 comments

Today’s question:

Today’s question comes from Theo. I am part of a team that just started working on our MVP for a SaaS product. I’m wondering when we should start building the marketing website? Should it be at the same time as we build the product so that we can get Alpha testers?

Jake’s answer:

This is an easy question: you should start building your website now.

Before you even start building your product you should build, at minimum, a landing page. Many people try to overcomplicate things

It should have two things: 1) The problem you are going to solve and 2) How you’re going to solve it.

A great product to do this is Ship by ProductHunt. It allows you for a small numbers of characters and doesn’t even offer all of the rest of the bells and whistles. When you’re still in development, having that is enough. You don’t know what it’s going to turn into over time, but you do know what the problem is and what your potential solution is.

For example, at LaunchPeer, the problem we are trying to solve is that it’s hard to find technical people to build your product for your startup. We are solving this by creating transparency in pricing and getting you access to technical people immediately. The problem and solution have never changed even though many other processes have.

As soon as you come up with your idea, it’s time to build your marketing website. You shouldn’t really start the MVP until you have the buy-in for the idea anyway.

Step-by-Step Launch Process

Setup a landing page. It should have the problem, the solution, and some type of sign up.

Start building the MVP. Utilize the list you’ve started to build as your testing grounds. Survey those people and ask them what they want to see. An MVP is the least amount you can build to solve that one pain point. What’s important is launching a product as quickly as you can so you can get those first 10-50 customers and gain a bit of traction.

Iterate on the product. Use the feedback you get from those initial users to help refine and build upon your original product. This feedback is invaluable and will ensure you are building something people will actually pay for and use.

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